Saturday, July 31, 2010

Richard Hoagland was given a ten-minute spot on Coast to Coast AM last night, divided about equally between Mars-face and Mud-logs.

This week the Univ. Arizona released an interesting false color image of the mesa that used to be called the 'Face' on Mars. Commenting on it, RCH said last night that it shows NASA is getting "increasingly desperate" as the time for disclosure draws near. In his mind, you see, the NASA/JPL/Arizona/The Nazis/The Masons/Whoever else hates Mike Bara/ conspiracy is always wrong. If they don't release images, then

"NASA seem[s] to have an aversion to investigating what seemed to be an ideal subject for the agency's agenda."
--"Dark Mission" 2nd edn. p. 76

If they do release images, it shows that they're "desperate."

By the way, Hoagland is correct that this is not strictly a new image. It's a colorized version of the image taken by the HiRISE telescope in April 2007. However, he was totally wrong in asserting that the image is useless because it's just a detail — "...like zooming in on the Mona Lisa's lip," as he put it. The released image is 'The Full Mona' or almost full. Hoagland was only looking at the detail in a news story.

Turning to the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, now successfully capped in defiance of Hoagland's prediction, he continued to mislead the C2C audience by warning that "pressurizing" the well might lead to a disastrous blow-out. He simply does not understand the top kill process. Why the producers of this popular radio show think he has any credibility on this topic is a profound mystery.

Interstitial to his two main topics, he slipped in some nonsense about Phobos and provided us with an easy test of his claims. He said:

"My inside sources say that there will be an important leak in the next few days .. [about the artificiality of Phobos]"

I'll give him a week before calling him a liar.

Update #1: 20:30 EDT Aug 1st
Adm. Thad Allen made Hoagland look like the clown he is today by stating:

"The pressure at the well is around 6,980 pounds per square inch and will increase slightly during the static kill. BP will stop the procedure if pressure rises above 8,000 pounds per square inch to avoid damaging the well."(Reported by Bloomberg)

Hoagland is so, so, wrong.

Update #2: 11:00 EDT Aug 6th
Time's up. Hoagland's a liar.

Update #3: Sept. 19th
AP reports the well is dead. Hoagland's a LIAR. Don't hope that he'll be on Coast-to-Coast AM eating his words. George Noory evidently believes Hoagland is the Pope.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

He's BAAAAA-aaaaaack!!! Another hour of ranting, flinging totally inaccurate accusations like stink-bombs and beating a few dead horses just for good measure.

There was nonsense about NASA and about the "artificial spaceships" Phobos and Lutetia, but most of the nonsense was once more about Deepwater Horizon:

He repeated yet again a plea for those mud logs and lamented the fact that Ed Markey of the congressional sub-committee on energy and mineral resources has not been able to prise them out of BP's fingers. Of course, Hoagland doesn't actually know that — he's just guessing. Markey may well have been shown them on a classified basis. Hoagland still didn't say what he'd actually do with them if he got them. This campaign of his is already a total FAIL, but neither he nor radio host George Noory have accepted that fact.

He called for the establishment of a network of tsunami warning buoys, presumably an extension of the existing DART system, ready for when that 20-mile wide methane bubble at a pressure of 100,000 psi erupts. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the methane bubble as he describes it doesn't exist, the distance from the Deepwater Horizon site to the coast of Florida is about 450 kM — a tsunami would be over the beaches and swim-up bars of St. Petersburg and Sarasota in less than an hour. New Orleans would be the world's biggest human aquarium in about ten minutes.

There was worse to come. Hoagland ranted several times about the stupidity of what he called the "pressurization" of the oil well by BP, a company that he described as concerned only about its profits and scandalously unanswerable to anybody representing "We, The People." He even apologized for getting hot under the collar, remarking that "when I see people doing really stupid things, I get mad."

Well, this diatribe was not merely inaccurate but the exact reverse of the truth — and as usual George Noory allowed it on the air exactly as though it were true. The real truth is that since 15th July the three-ram capping stack has successfully stopped all but a trickle of oil and gas from the Macondo well. The gigantic three-month long gusher has actually had the effect of REDUCING pressure, from about 9,000 psi to today's 6,800 psi. The idea that the well is being pressurized is pure fantasy. As for lack of oversight of BP's practices — Adm. Thad Allen represents the people of the USA and he's very firmly in charge. Over the weekend he sent a headmasterly letter to BP reminding them that they had to do things his way, and directing them to continue the tests and seismic surveys.

What Hoagland didn't mention — probably because he doesn't understand — is that the reduced pressure in the well has got some experts thinking again about a so-called "top kill." This is the same procedure that was tried unsuccessfully back on 26th May — injection of enough drilling mud to counterbalance the upward thrust of the column of oil under pressure. The pressure proved too great to overcome in May, but now that it's reduced a kill may be possible. However, it won't happen unless Adm. Allen approves.

Either by means of the top kill or the relief well — very likely both — this well will be dead and sealed in a couple of weeks, weather permitting. High-pressure oil and gas will continue to exist under that part of the sea bed. But it was Mother Nature, not BP, that put it there.

Hoagland still hasn't written the White Paper he announced five weeks ago, and for that I guess we can be thankful. Hoagland is wrong about the sabotage; he's wrong about the pressure; and he's wrong about that other gash in the Earth's crust spewing even more oil. His continued access to the public media, to spout utter lies to a radio audience of around six million, is a very palpable disgrace.

Friday, July 16, 2010

You may find this hard to believe, but I swear it's as true as the day is long.

On the 14th July, at 12:30 pm, Richard Hoagland posted on his FB page, on the subject of the new cap on the Deepwater Horizon gusher:

I'll bet they quietly closed the first valve at "19.5" tonight ... on 7-14--Just as we predicted.Ritual Uber Alles .... :)

Well, Richard dear, there are just two problems with that. One is that they didn't close any valves at 19:30 that night. The other is that you didn't predict it.

For most of the 14th, the capping stack wasn't even on the well-head. It had been hauled back up to the surface to replace a leaky hydraulic line. Hoagland had indeed suggested (on 13th July) that the utter madness that is numerology was playing a part in BP operations, but he never predicted the first event at 7:30 pm.

We're quite used to Hoagland's claims of "I predicted that" being fraudulent, but now they venture into new territory, referring to an event that never even happened.

Meanwhile, one firm prediction he did make — on 12th July at 11:50 pm — looks like going down in flames along with just about every other prediction he's ever recorded.

suddenly -- the White House is DEMANDING real proof of BP's claims ... and this "48-hour-pressure-test" of the NEW cap, is to PROVE to the White House the actual existence of those other fissures ....

So, if THAT is the case, the much-hyped "new cap pressure test" will FAIL ....

Right now the gusher has stopped, and the pressure is reportedly 6,700 psi. Too low to call a success, but too high to cry failure. Last night on the radio Hoagland dismissed the news as "another BP lie."

I have a different opinion about who's lying here.

Update #1: 15:30 EDT July 17th
The 48-hour period of the originally-planned test of the 3-ram capping stack has now expired, with no oil leak. Oil pressure is at 6,745 psi, rising at about 2 psi/hr and expected to stabilise at 6,800. There are two credible theories as to why the pressure did not reach the hoped-for 8,000 psi. One is simply that so much oil has flowed out of the damaged well that the resource is actually depleted: another is a phenomenon of cross-flow meaning, essentially, that oil is circulating between one underground cavity and another.

One very positive data point is that the temperature in the well has reduced to ambient. When oil is flowing the temperature rises significantly.

BP has announced that the testing period will now be extended for a further 24 hours, and also that when tests conclude they will release the valves and start recovering 60,000 barrels a day from the well. If you want to be cynical, you might say that BP can hardly wait to start generating some revenue from the damn well. Cynics will be looking for BP to find excuses to delay the final cementing that will kill their "golden goose," currently scheduled for early August. It does also seem that BP has been keeping information closer to its chest than is appropriate in the circumstances.

However, the bottom line is that the test started on July 15th DID NOT FAIL.

So let's summarise Richard Hoagland's errors up to this point.

* He wrote that "our data indicates that [Deepwater Horizon] was sabatoged[sic]" but never came up with any such data.

* He stated that there was a 20-mile wide bubble of methane at a pressure of 100,000 psi threatening to erupt. This has found no support from people who know what they're talking about, and has been ridiculed by geologists.

* He stated that there was a gash in the Earth's crust 10 miles from Deepwater Horizon, gushing 120,000 barrels a day. This is the bizarre opinion of only one other man -- Matthew Simmons of the Ocean Energy Institute.

* He very confidently predicted that the cap test would fail.

* He called the preliminary announcement that the well had been capped "another BP lie."

So Richard Hoagland's performance on this event has been as dismally inaccurate as his previous record of trash and/or alarmist predicting. Why does Coast to Coast AM continue to give him access to their audience?

If we can keep them from doing this stupid "static kill," this still can be resolved in safety.

But, that requires that we communiate IMMEDIATELY with Congressman Ed Markey, demanding that this latest, insane idea of BP be permanently shelved (the "static kill"), that the well be placed BACK in "containment" (oil piped up to the ships, ... thus relieving the pressure ...) until the relief well is in position to begin to kill this monster FROM THE BOTTOM (which will NOT put additional pressure on the well or the fragile formations above the high-pressure methane/oil reservoir ...).

He clearly thinks that BP operations have increased pressure in the well, instead of, as is the actual fact, decreasing it. And, considering that he characterized the initial announcement that the well had been capped as "another BP lie" he's not supposed to think that the "static kill" is even a serious option.

Question to RCH: Why hasn't that ENORMOUS quantity of oil flowing from that OTHER gash in the seabed not been seen by anyone??

Meanwhile, Adm. Allen and his advisors have one hell of a hard decision to make. A possible tropical storm is headed for the site. The relief well drilling has already been suspended and a storm plug installed. It looks like the rigs and ships surrounding the Macondo well will have to leave for at least five days. Do they leave the well capped and unsupervised, or do they release the oil once more?

Update #3: 16:30 EDT July 26th
Well, they took the brave decision to keep the lid on. Tropical storm Bonnie fizzled, and all the vessels are now back on station. Oil pressure is 6,900 psi — a good indicator that the well is not leaking into the rocks — and the top kill is scheduled to begin a week from today. Still no sign whatever of the MUCH LARGER oil leak Richard Hoagland has twice referred to.

On his FB page today, Hoagland trotted out some story about HAARP being used to create southerly winds, as "they" are now "increasingly desperate" to keep oil off the beaches. What a load of claptrap. The person in this who's increasingly desperate is Hoagland himself. No mud logs, no methane explosion, no huge gash. It's now obvious to everyone that his comment that the capping of the well was "another BP lie" was itself a lie.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

At this point, a month after Richard Hoagland first demanded the mud logs from Deepwater Horizon, his campaign has to be seen as not merely an EPIC FAIL but a bunch of alarmist, mendacious nonsense. If the mud logs have been provided at all, it is in classified form to the Congress, certainly not to Hoagland and certainly not as a result of his daft self-promoting campaign.

Hoagland screamed that the "methane bubble" was at a lethal pressure of 100,000 psi. Last night Adm. Thad Allen said on TV network news that if the new capping procedure (Top Hat #10) was successful the pressure would rise to 8-9,000 psi. Online sources (e.g. The Guardian newspaper) published a picture of the pressure gauge that would test this. Hard to know how a pressure gauge that pegs at 10,000 could measure 100,000, isn't it?

Who are you going to believe — an admiral with access to all information sources public, private and classified, or an out of work former museum curator who, when asked what his sources are, replies "inside information"?

Hoagland has made much of the city-killing potential of this so-called 100,000 psi methane bubble, advising that the whole of Alabama, Georgia and Florida are at risk from the colossal explosion and fast-moving tsunami that are imminent. Scientists who are qualified to assess this claim have said it is nonsense. Who are you going to believe — UCSB and Woods Hole geologists, or a totally unqualified radio entertainer who has been caught peddling alarmist lies on many previous occasions?

Hoagland claimed that the Deepwater Horizon blowout was just a sideshow — that the real threat was a gash in the Earth's crust ten miles away spewing even more oil. The truth is that the NOAA research vessel Thomas Jefferson, on a mission to detect underwater oil plumes from Deepwater Horizon, did note a fault in the vicinity but not that it was gushing oil. In all probability it is not related to Deepwater Horizon at all. The primary source of this alarmist rumor is Matthew Simmons, who has made a number of inaccurate statements about the Gulf of Mexico.

The radio show Coast to Coast AM has, on two occasions, provided a public platform for this arrant rubbish. In the circumstances of what is obviously a public emergency of unprecedented seriousness, do they think this is responsible broadcasting?

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Mike Bara's youtube ID is osiris19533. Osiris has been busy uploading a Bara-flood of self-promotion that even his erstwhile co-author Richard Hoagland would envy. A Nine-parter called "World in Crisis," a 2-part 'MUFON-LA,' and three videos captioned 'Mike Bara Alien Event.' I confess I haven't looked at every second of these Bara-vids, but from sampling I've got the idea that these are all Mike Bara lecturing and powerpointing to paying audiences of the already-converted, the true believers, the Branch Hoaglandians, the UFO-abductees. I almost wrote "...suckers." The content of the lectures seems to be the usual pseudo-scientific claptrap having a highly approximate relationship to the truth.

In Part 1 of "World in Crisis," wittily sub-titled And The Emerging Shift In Consciousness, Rev. Brian Keneipp (who has a nifty and dangerously unreligious taste in matching ties and shirts) introduces Bara as an "award-winning author" (at which Mike grins sheepishly.)

In comments under this vid, a viewer called sirrahusa writes (6/30):

Award-winning author? Huhhh???? That wretched book didn't win any awards. It received precisely ZERO professional reviews and the reader reviews on Amazon were largely mockery.

Read the dorkmission blog for an itemized list of the appalling technical errors in Bara's book. He's completely ignorant in the field of planetary astronomy.[I added the link, it wasn't in the original Youtube post, obviously]

Mike responded yesterday with an all-too-typical lapse of either truth, logic, or just plain decency:

Obviously, you are just another front ID for that douchebag known as expat.Yeah, other than getting to #21 on the NYT Bestsellers, list,﻿ it didn't win any "awards."

Douchebag...

He then banned sirrahusa from further commenting, just as he banned me from the darkmission blog, despite a prominent hyperlinked invitation "Want to discuss [the book]? Visit the Dark Mission Blog."

sirrahusa found a niche where he was not yet banned, and wrote as follows:

Hi Mike... I'm lucky enough to have had a French gf at one﻿ time, and I can tell you that a douchebag isn't that bad. It's just a bag of water, often with some antiseptic added. Maybe you could find a more appropriate insult to use when logical argument fails you.

BTW, almost making it to the NYT best-seller list is NOT an award. Cheers.

That's where things stand so far. I'll keep you posted -- especially if Mike Bara ever writes anything other than insults. If Mike should happen to wish to comment right here, he's very welcome to. I don't believe in banning people whose views I disagree with.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Richard Hoagland's campaign to wrest the mud logs (see previous post on this blog) from Deepwater Horizon's owner, BP, didn't work. Or at least, it clearly hadn't worked by end-of-business (end-of-barbecue, perhaps?) on the National Holiday. For there he was, on Coast to Coast AM for two solid hours, taking another bite of the same cherry pie.

In tones that ran the gamut from shrill to outright ranting, he exhorted his disciples to storm the gates of the US Congress metaphorically with e-mailery. He added an equally Stentorian plea for somebody to get him access to James Carville, who is apparently some magic component of the campaign. ONLY IF WE GET THOSE MUD LOGS, he explained again, can we solve this catastrophe.

In a remarkable act of self-contradiction, he went on to propose two separate technical solutions to the gusher problem — and the solutions did not apparently depend in any way on those damned logs.

FIRST, he wants BP to use nuclear technology to insert a high-energy emitter of radiation so powerful that it would plasticize the rock at some depth around the well-bore and so pinch it off. He was perhaps unaware that the bore is lined by a strong steel casing that would surely frustrate such an approach.

SECOND, he believes the gub'mint has secret access to a fearsome "torsion field weapon" which would be capable of freezing the entire 3-mile column of oil solid. "They could then," he explained breathlessly, "pour in the heavy mud and concrete and seal the well for good." Host George Noory missed an opportunity to ask how on Earth mud and concrete could successfully be poured into a frozen column of oil. But then, listeners to George Noory are quite accustomed to his habit of letting utterly illogical propositions slide right on by.

In a further display of shameless self-contradiction, Hoagland then announced that the gusher we've all seen gushing away in video for 70 days is not the main event in the Gulf of Mexico. It's "a sideshow — a distraction." THE BIG DEAL is a gash in the Earth's crust 10 miles away and some hundreds of feet long, leaking proportionately copious amounts of oil without, apparently, anyone paying attention to it. Again, the hilarious illogicality of that idea didn't seem to occur to Noory.

RCH then turned to the plight of the millions of people on land who are already being subjected to near-toxic levels of methane and hydrogen sulfide in the air. "Go and buy gas masks and ozone generators," he urged them, "or simply move house." This was quite possibly sensible advice, albeit from the mouth of one who is utterly unqualified to pronounce on such matters.

Possibly he felt he was qualified by proxy to his girlfriend, Robin Falkov, who he revealed uses an ozone generator while flying on commercial airlines. Given that almost everyone can detect ozone at a concentration as low as 0.1 part per million, and that most people's response is mild to severe headache, it's quite hard to imagine anything more inconsiderate to fellow passengers than such a device. Mustard gas, perhaps.

All in all, a classic example of Richard Hoagland attempting to position himself to be able to claim that he was a key player in this disaster and its aftermath. It was, of course, totally despicable and C2C-AM would be ashamed of allowing it if they had any sense of shame at all. Alas, they don't.

Update:
Today, July 10th, somebody possibly called Roo Reindeer posted this link on Hoagland's FB page, making it seem that he could get what he says he wants just by plonking down a few dollars. So what would he do then?